THE RITUALS OF DINNER: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners by Margaret Vissers is packed with information about the different ways we approach eating together — who you invite to a dinner party, whether it’s acceptable to refuse, the purpose of the meal (is it to honor your guests? To flaunt your wealth?). and culture-specific quirks (in one African tribe you accept even a single nut with both hands because using one hand implies it’s unimpressively small). Visser is less informative when explaining underlying meanings — did you know the hamburger is the least social meal because a circular food embodies self-sufficient completeness? A bigger problem is that her writing style drones in my head, making the book a slog to get through.
THE PREY OF GODS by Nicky Drayden is set in a near future South Africa where even poor kids have some sort of service robot attending them. A centuries old demigoddess launches a scheme to trigger the latent divine powers the story hovers awkwardly on whether we’re talking real magic or some kind of metagene) in others, thereby creating legions she can either lead to glory or drain for food. Can an alliance including a trans politician, a couple of doped up kids, a ten-year-old and a superstar singer with multiple sclerosis stop her? Not as good as Drayden’s later Temper, but still enjoyable.
SHOWCASE PRESENTS METAMORPHO by Bob Haney and various artists (most notably Ramona Fradon, but also Joe Orlando and Sal Trapani) collects DC’s Element Man’s Silver Age series, his try-out issues in Brave and Bold and team-ups with Batman, the Justice League and the Metal Men.
In the opening issue, legendary adventurer and soldier of fortune Rex Mason accepts a million dollar mission from corrupt plutocrat Simon Stagg: recover a meteoric fragment known as the Orb of Ra from an ancient pyramid. If Mason succeeds he’ll finally have enough money to marry Stagg’s daughter Sapphire and walk away from her power-hungry dad — but Stagg is determined to see that doesn’t happen. Accompanied by Java, a hulking man-ape Mason recovered from an Indonesian bog (contrary to later stories, he’s not a Java Man), Rex enters the pyramid where Java, on Stagg’s orders, takes the orb and leaves Mason trapped inside. Encountering the meteor from which the orb was forged, Rex Mason changes …
It’s difficult to capture now, when freaky looking superheroes are the norm, just how bizarre Metamorpho looked on the cover; his shapechanging, too, looked weirder than anything in comics. The stories are a mix, ranging from dark and hardboiled to full-on camp. I was a fan, though like most Silver Age stuff, YMMV.
Ultimately the book didn’t have the sales to last. Haney tried shaking things up with a three part arc that apparently wrote Sapphire Stagg and the rest of the supporting cast except for the annoying character Element Girl. The axe fell on the comic after Part Two, below, aired (cover by Jack Sparling). When Metamorpho returned four years later, Element Girl and the reboot were forgotten in favor of the old status quo.
Chip Zdarsky wrote and drew PUBLIC DOMAIN, a five issue miniseries about the Dallas family, whose patriarch Sid is the co-creator of the iconic hero Domain (a minor complaint I have is that we never learn why he gets such an odd hero name). Sid’s been shut out of the millions in movie money that the company makes off Domain but now it appears there’s evidence all the rights belong to Syd — can he win back what he made?
On the plus side, the family are well-developed characters. On the downside this five-issues-and-done series wraps up everything a little too easily (problem gamblers, for instance, frequently don’t quit because they got out of the hole and settled their debts), making this little more than a fan fantasy — wouldn’t it be great if Jack Kirby/Bill Finger/Steve Ditko got a fresh chance to create Fantastic Four/Batman/Spider-Man stories, and got the money they deserved? Well, yes, but that doesn’t make for a worthwhile story.
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